Affiliated Faculty

  • Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture

    Laurel Bestock's research focuses on the material culture of the Nile Valley. She is particularly interested in kingship, monumentality, the contexts and audiences for art and architecture, and cultural interactions.

  • John Bodel

    W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics, Professor of History

    John Bodel studies ancient Roman social, economic, and cultural history and Latin literature, especially of the empire. Much of his research involves inscriptions, and he has special interests in Roman religion, slavery, funerals and burial customs, ancient writing systems, the editing of Latin epigraphic and literary texts, and Latin prose authors. Since 1995, he has directed the U.S.

  • Christopher Chan and Michelle Ma Professor of the History of Art

    Medieval architecture and archaeology; digital humanities

    I am an archaeologist and architectural historian specializing in the study of medieval sites and their representation. I am currently Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, and Professor of Archaeology.

  • David Buchta

    Lecturer, Classics

    Ancient Indian intellectual traditions, especial grammatical traditions and philosophy/theology

    David Buchta's primary area of specialization is Sanskrit poetry and theology of bhakti, particularly in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition associated with Caitanya (1486-1533).

  • Charles Carroll

    Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning

    Medieval gender and sexualities, premodern higher education

    Charles Carroll, Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, is a historian of medieval France with specific interests in gender and sexuality as well as the history of higher education.

  • John Cherry

    Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology, Professor of Classics, Professor of Anthropology

    After a brief stint in the late 1970s in the Department of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, John Cherry was appointed to a University Lectureship in Aegean Prehistory in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge (1980 - 1993), and as a Fellow and Tutor at Fitzwilliam College, where he

  • Tamara Chin

    Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

    Tamara Chin works on comparative approaches to antiquity, with a focus on: Han dynasty and early Chinese texts; the Afro-Eurasian "Silk Road"; historical narrative; and with broader interests in classical reception; and in economic, environmental, and kinship studies.

  • Associate Professor of History

    Mediterranean in late antiquity, early medieval Europe, long-distance social interconnectedness, empire, violence, trauma

    Jonathan P. Conant's research focuses on the inter-regional integration of the Mediterranean and the transition from antiquity to the middle ages.

  • Harold Cook

    John F. Nickoll Professor of History

    history of medicine, science, knowledge practices

    Hal Cook comes from the American Midwest, although he is now a British as well as US citizen, having devoted almost a decade to his work as Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

  • Zach Dunseth Visiting Assistant Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World

    Zach completed his Ph.D. in Geoarchaeology under the supervision of Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Prof. Ruth Shahack-Gross of the University of Haifa. His dissertation focused on the Intermediate Bronze Age (c. 2500-1950 BCE) settlement phenomena in the arid Negev Highlands through a microarchaeological perspective. Zach received his B.A.

  • Sasha-Mae Eccleston

    John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics

    Ancient Greek and Roman literature, Roman Imperial cultures, Classical Reception, Literary Theory, Ecocriticism and Critical Materialisms

    An alumna of Brown Classics and Literary Arts, Sasha-Mae's research primarily interrogates the politics and ethics of form with an eye to questions of the human, the animal, and other kinds of embodied difference (e.g. race and/or gender).  She is currently at work on two book projects.

  • Visiting Assistant Professor, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

    Roman Archaeology, Environmental history

  • Visiting Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, Contemplative Studies

    Sanskrit texts and philology; South Asian Religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism; ritual studies; sensory studies; sound studies; yoga studies

  • Mary Louise Gill

    David Benedict Professor of Classics and Philosophy

    Mary Louise Gill joined the Brown Philosophy and Classics Departments in 2001 after teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. She has held visiting appointments at Dartmouth, Stanford, UCLA, UC Davis, and Harvard.

  • Yannis Hamilakis

    Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies

    Yannis Hamilakis has studied at the University of Crete (BA History and Archaeology), and the University of Sheffield (MSc and PhD).  He has taught at the University of Wales Lampeter (1996-2000) and the University of Southampton in the UK (2000-2016).  He has been Wiener Lab Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens (1993-1994), Mary Seeger O'Boyle Fellow at Princeton Universi

  • Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies

  • Johanna Hanink

    Associate Professor of Classics

    Johanna Hanink earned her PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge (Queens' College). Her work in classics focused on classical Athens, particularly the cultural life of the city's fourth century BCE. She is also interested in the intersections between modern politics and ideas about ancient Greece (and antiquity more generally).

  • Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature and French Studies

    Ancient Greek and Roman literature, epic/empire, women and gender, hagiography

  • Dupee Family Professor of Social Science

    Royal courts, writing systems, emotions, ontology, concepts of materials, ancient imagery and representation, text-picture relations, lidar and settlement, epigraphy, decipherment

    Stephen Houston's research interests include archaeology; kingship and court systems; body concepts in antiquity; writing systems; epigraphy and decipherment; architecture and urbanism; Classic Maya; South America; Europe. He is concluding excavations at the Classic Maya city of El Zotz, Guatemala, and has finished five seasons of work at the ruins of Piedras Negras, Guatemala.

  • Nancy Khalek

    Associate Professor of Religious Studies

    Medieval Islam, History of emotions

    Nancy Khalek is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and specializes in Late Antiquity and Islam. She received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2006.

  • Stephen Kidd

    Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Classics

    Stephen Kidd specializes in Greek literature of the classical period, especially comedy and philosophy.  His first book Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy (Cambridge, 2014) asks why comedy, unlike other genres, gives rise to the perception that some part of it is not meaningful (“just silly”, “just funny”) despite the fact that new meanings continue to be discovered year afte

  • John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Classics and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature

    Greek and Roman literature and philosophy

  • Professor Emerita, Religious Studies and Judaic Studies

    Jews in the late antique Mediterranean diaspora; ancient Christianity, religion and gender in the ancient Mediterranean

    Ross S. Kraemer, Emerita Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies, specializes in early Christianity and other religions of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, including early Judaism.

  • Andrew Laird

    John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities, Professor of Classics, Professor of Hispanic Studies

    Andrew Laird came to Brown in 2016 from Warwick University in the UK, where he was Professor of Classical Literature. His research interests extend beyond ancient Greece and Rome to the European Renaissance and colonial Latin America, with a focus on the role of humanism in mediating native languages and legacies in sixteenth-century Mexico.

  • Brian Lander

    Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society

    Brian Lander studies the environmental history of ancient China, focusing on how the natural ecosystems of the Yellow and Yangzi river valleys were gradually replaced with farmland.

  • Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture

    East Asia

    Jeffrey Moser’s research attends, broadly, to the conceptual and material processes whereby past things are made present, with particular attention to the ways in which these processes intersect in the artistic practices and scholarly techne of medieval China.

  • Pura Nieto

    Senior Lecturer in Classics

    Pura Nieto Hernández was born in Salamanca, Spain, where she attended the university as an undergraduate and graduate student. Both her degrees are in Classics (PhD 1990). She taught there between the years 1990-1994 before coming to Brown as a Visiting Assistant Professor for the academic year 1997-8.

  • Graham Oliver

    Professor of Classics, Professor of History

    Greek ancient history (especially social and economic); Greek epigraphy and monumental culture; the reception of ancient Greece; war memorials and commemorative practices.

    Graham Oliver undertook both his undergraduate studies in Classics (BA Literae Humaniores, 1989) and his doctoral studies (D. Phil Ancient History, 1995) at Oxford University. He moved to The University of Liverpool in 1994 where he taught until 2013 before coming to Brown as Professor of Classics.

  • Saul Olyan

    Samuel Ungerleider, Jr. Professor of Judaic Studies, Professor of Religious Studies

    Saul M. Olyan is Samuel Ungerleider Jr. Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University.

  • Robert Preucel

    James Manning Professor of Anthropology, Director of Haffenreffer Museum

    Robert Preucel received his doctorate from UCLA in 1988. He was a member of Jim Hill's Pajarito Archaeological Research Project and wrote his dissertation on seasonal agricultural circulation. He was the 6th Annual CAI Visiting Scholar at SIU Carbondale in 1989 and organized a conference on the Processual/Postprocessual debate.

  • Jason Protass

    William A. Dyer, Jr. Assistant Professor of the Humanities & Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

    Jason Protass (Ph.D., Stanford) specializes in Chinese Buddhism of the Northern and Southern Song dynasties (960-1279). His current book project, tentatively titled "The Poetry Demon," examines Buddhist monks' self-understanding of religious occupation and poetic composition in the tenth to thirteenth centuries CE.

  • Joseph Pucci

    Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Classics

    Joseph Pucci is Professor of Classics and in the Program in Medieval Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown, where he teaches courses on classical, later and medieval Latin language and literature, literary selfhood in late antique and medieval literature, the western tradition, and reception studies.

  • Professor Emeritus of Classics

    social and political history of the Roman republic; social, political, and intellectual history of archaic and classical Greece; comparative history of the ancient world

    Kurt A. Raaflaub (Greek and Roman History) retired from Brown in 2009 but remains connected with the university and department. Having (co-)edited three volumes (Epic and History; Geography and Ethnography; The Roman Empire in Context) in 2010-11 in his series, The Ancient World, Comparative Histories, he is preparing another, on thinking and writing history in the ancient world.

  • Srinivas Reddy

    Visiting Assistant Professor, Religious Studies

    South Asia

    Srinivas began his musical training as a guitarist and composer. In 1998 he graduated from Brown University with a BA in South Asian Studies and completed his senior project entitled NaadaSat, a multi-instrumental ensemble piece that reflected his growing interest in South Asian philosophy and music.

  • Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature

    Ancient Greek and Latin literature; early modern Latin poetry; Classical reception studies

    Jay Reed is a scholar of Ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture, and has worked especially on Hellenistic and Augustan poetry. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1987, and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Stanford in 1991 and 1993. He previously taught Classics at the Ohio State University, Cornell, and the University of Michigan.

  • Amy Remensnyder

    Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence, Professor of History

    Amy G. Remensnyder joined the Brown faculty in 1993, where she is now Professor of History and Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence.  She earned her A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University, studied at Cambridge University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, and received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley.

  • Assistant Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Classics

    Candace Rice is an archaeologist whose research focuses on Mediterranean maritime trade and economic development during the Roman period. She is particularly interested in exploring what the archaeological record reveals about the ways in which connectivity changed the nature of the Roman economy through enhanced supra-regional integration and specialized local economic development.

  • Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture

    Art and Architecture of Ancient Rome; Art and Architecture of Ancient Mesoamerica; Archaeology; Religious Studies

  • Felipe Rojas

    Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology

    My interests in the ancient world are diverse, but I specialize on the Eastern Mediterranean during the classical period. I am writing a book exploring how people in Greek and Roman Anatolia used Bronze and Iron Age material culture to substantiate narratives about local and universal history.

  • Director of the Program in Early Cultures, Associate Professor of Classics, Associate Professor of History

    Architecture, urbanism, and space

    Amy Russell is a Roman political and cultural historian, with a particular interest in architecture, urbanism, and space. She is currently working on a monograph on the building activity of the imperial Senate, part of a larger project on the contributions of multiple social groups to imperial imagery and ideology.

  • Associate Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology

    Matthew Rutz works in the field of Assyriology, the interdisciplinary study of texts written in the cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") writing system from ancient Mesopotamia, traditionally the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (present-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey).

  • Kenneth Sacks

    Professor of History, Professor of Classics

    Kenneth Sacks received his Ph.D. from California, Berkeley in Ancient History. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1976-1995, at which time he came to Brown as Professor of History and Dean of the College. He has been full time in the history department since 1998.

  • Michael Satlow

    Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies

    Professor Michael L. Satlow received his Ph.D. in "Ancient Judaism" from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1993. His most recent book is How the Bible Became Holy. He is on the board of Henoch and is a co-editor of the Brown Judaic Studies series. He has held ACLS and Guggenheim Fellowships.

  • Janine Sawada

    Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies

    Religious and intellectual history of East Asia

    Janine Sawada specializes in the religious and intellectual history of early modern Japan. She is currently studying the religious movement dedicated to Mt. Fuji (later called Fujiko) with particular attention to the role of prayer rituals (kaji kito) in its formative phases, during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

  • Andrew Scherer

    Associate Professor of Anthropology, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World

    Andrew Scherer is an anthropological archaeologist and biological anthropologist with a geographic focus in Mesoamerica (Maya). He co-directs an interdisciplinary archaeological research project that is exploring Classic Maya polities along the Usumacinta River in Mexico.

  • John Steele

    Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Egyptology and Assyriology, Chair of Egyptology and Assyriology

    John Steele is a historian of the exact sciences in antiquity. He specializes in the history of astronomy, with a particular focus on Babylonian astronomy.

  • Director, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Anthropology

    Peter van Dommelen is a Mediterranean archaeologist, whose research and teaching revolve around the rural Mediterranean past and present. The regional focus of his work lies in the western Mediterranean, where he carries out long-term fieldwork on the island of Sardinia.

  • Parker VanValkenburgh

    Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of Social Sciences & Assistant Professor of Anthropology

    Art and Architecture of Ancient Rome; Art and Architecture of Ancient Mesoamerica; Archaeology; Religious Studies

    Parker VanValkenburgh is an archaeologist whose research focuses on landscapes, politics and environmental change in the Early Modern World – particularly, in late prehispanic and early colonial Peru. He received his Ph.D. in 2012 from Harvard University and previously held positions at the University of Vermont (Assistant Prof. of Anthropology, 2013-15) and Washington University in St.